"Suicide as protest for the new generation of Chinese migrant workers: Foxconn, Global capital, and the state" is the title of an strong-worded, analytical article by Jenny Chan and Pun Ngai, published in the September 2010 issue of the Asia Pacific Journal: Focus on Japan. The authors interpret the suicides as protest against a global labour regime that is widely practiced in China. The defiant deaths of the Foxconn workers demand that society reflects upon the costs of a state-promoted development model that sacrifices dignity for corporate profit in the name of economic growth. Chinese migrant labor conditions as articulated by the state, are shaped by these intertwined forces. Leading brands, abusive management, and local Chinese officials all play their respective, but reinforcing roles.

• First, leading international brands have adopted unethical purchasing practices, resulting in substandard conditions in their global electronics supply chains.
• Second, management has used abusive and illegal methods to raise worker efficiency, generating widespread grievances and resistance at the workplace level.
• Third, local Chinese officials in collusion with enterprise management, systematically neglect workers’ rights, resulting in widespread misery and deepened social inequalities.

The Foxconn human tragedy raises profound concerns about the working lives of the new generation of Chinese migrant workers. It also challenges the state-driven policy based on the use of internal rural migrant workers, whose labor and citizenship rights have been violated.

 

“To die is the only way to testify that we ever lived.

Perhaps for the Foxconn employees and employees like us – we who are called nongmingong, rural migrant workers, in China –

the use of death is simply to testify that we were ever alive at all, and that while we lived, we had only despair”,

writes a Foxconn worker in a blog post on 27 May 2010, after the 12th jump at Foxconn.